


Standing Stones

by Lizardlicks



Series: Consolation Prize [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, I'm Sorry, M/M, Post SBURB, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 01:03:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardlicks/pseuds/Lizardlicks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t want to see it.</p><p>Oh god you don’t want to look at the ridiculous thing.  You just want to forget.  You want to curl into a dark corner and melt into oblivion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standing Stones

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry. I really can't apologize enough for this, actually.

(For maximum "pleasure," listen to [The Last Man](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUgC6215Gko) and [Stay With Me by](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVM1JxBx2TA) Clint Mansell while reading)

You walk with your head down against the wind and carefully place one foot in front of the other.  If you just take it one step at a time and don’t think about where you’re going, maybe you’ll be able to see this through. The grass is dry and the morning’s light coating of frost crackles under each step like dry bones.  Like dead things.  The clouds hang low and cling to the ground in some places; even your breath hangs in the air, heavy and thick, with out the decency to fuck off and just leave you alone after your lungs have drawn out any thing useful from it.  
  
It’s an effort to pick up your feet.  More often than not you can only shuffle them awkwardly, but you’re going to have to actually pick up and put some effort into it soon.  You’re coming to the small hill now if you remember the place right.  You haven’t been out here since that first day, but it’s starting to look familiar.  
  
The nearer you get, the heavier you feel.  
  
It’s the third time in the hour now that you’ve thought about calling the whole thing off.  Just turn around, and drag your pathetic ass back to the nice warm car.  Toss these stupid cultivated weeds you’ve been  clutching in your hand into a waste receptacle some where and forget you were ever considering this exercise in futility.  Your grip tightens around the flowers involuntarily and you glance down at them again.  They’re absurdly bright against the landscape.  Their cheery color  is almost obscene, irreverent, and you can’t fathom any reason behind the practice of leaving them as tribute to the dead, but Aradia insisted it was a tradition and Rose thought it might be cathartic...  
  
You don’t want to see it.

Oh god you don’t want to look at the ridiculous thing.  You just want to forget.  You want to curl into a dark corner and melt into oblivion.  You tried.  God damn it all to what ever abyss this stupid excuse for a reward of a world had invented, you have tried so hard to just stop feeling anything.  You had thought that you’d almost even succeeded at one point.  You had started to think that maybe the washed out grey world you had awoken to one day meant you finally stopped caring and could just be.  
  
You had been able to go through the motions of the day without finding something that forcibly punched you in the gut with reminders of him and left you breathless and shaking and choking back tears.  Eating, bathing, breathing, you could do it all on reflex with out having to think, and you believed, however briefly, that maybe you could actually stutter through the rest of your hopefully short existence like this. Then Dave had found you a week later standing on the roof of your hive, looking out over the edge and down the long drop to the patio below.  He’d grabbed your arm and jerked you back so fast that something in your shoulder  had popped and twinged with pain.   
  
Later, you shakily admitted that you hadn’t any idea why you’d been up here and really couldn’t remember having a reason to go up in the first place, though it had seemed like a good idea at the time.  
  
That night, he and Terezi had all but forcibly abducted you and whisked you away to Rose and Kanaya’s residence.  For a ‘talk.’  You knew an intervention when you saw one.  You’d watched enough god-awful human entertainment to gather that much.   
  
After settling in to the big, extra cushy armchair in the main meeting room and tiredly accepting  a warm mug of something sweet and faintly spicy smelling from a hovering rainbow drinker with more worry than you thought absolutely necessary painted on her face, Rose had sat across from you and eased you into conversation.  She was good at what she did.  Drawing out bits and pieces of information from seemingly innocuous chatter, you’d word waltz until you landed, dizzy and a little sick, on the heart of the matter: you were hurting.  You were in agony, bone deep and chewing mercilessly at your soul and you needed your moirail, but your moirail wasn’t there and that was the reason you were in such pain.  
  
With a frown of sympathy, she’d suggested seeking a ‘professional’ in the matter.  Her psychology still sat firmly in the realm of the arm chair variety and they all knew it.  Depression and deep loss, she’d said, was not any thing to take lightly or try to just slog through on your own, and you needed a full, functioning support network beyond well intentioned but relatively clueless friends to cope with what had happened.  
  
You’d balked.  You were not going to throw ludicrous amounts of currency at a pale prostitute for a half-assed jam session and you’d told her as much.  Vehemently.  She’d sighed and nodded and said she’d thought as much.  This was her next suggestion.  
  
So now here you are.  Climbing the gentle slope in the bitter cold of a late fall morning, miserable and angry and just a little bit terrified and you can’t figure out why.  
  
This is stupid.  This isn’t going to help anything, just get back into the car and go home.  You can put on a stupid movie and cocoon yourself in blankets and maybe you’ll dredge up enough stunted, shriveled emotion to sniffle a little at the contrived and overly romantic ending and-  
  
The fog parts, ahead of you and the dark form sitting at the very top of the hill is suddenly stark and terribly clear.  You swallow hard around the thick knot that’s formed in your throat.

You haven’t wanted to turn and run from something so badly.  Not Jack.  Not Lord English.  Not from any fate or death you’d suffered during the sweeps of playing the game that took so much of your life from you.  
  
But your feet, your damn traitorous feet are still carrying you forward and you don’t stop till  you’re standing right there, bent over it.  
  
The air has gone deathly still which it shouldn’t have.  It’s been cutting like knives and rattling the dead flora the whole trek out to this spot with the spiteful force of a wiggler throwing a tantrum.  Unprotected on this hill, it should be clawing your jacket off and angrily ruffling your hair till it blinds you, but everything has gone still and silent.  You shiver and it isn’t because of the cold.  
  
This feels like a fever dream.  The world’s shittiest fever dream, full of chill and grey and dullness and lifelessness but still vivid and tangible.  Any moment you’ll wake up from it and you’ll be back in your shitty fucking hive, curled up in your recoupracoon and none of this will be real.  
  
You’re body is still working on automatic, taking signals and cues that aren’t coming from the active parts of your brain.  The hand you’ve  kept stuffed in you jacket pocket has extracted itself and you watch with a strange detachment as it reaches out.  It honestly looks to you like you’re watching someone else move, reaching for the solid slab of stone buried into the hillside.  
  
Then, you fingers brush the chilled granite and it’s suddenly too real.  
  
Everything snaps into focus with weight and gravity, crushing and dreadful, and you slump, gasping raggedly at the mist.  You don’t pull away though.  You can’t, not yet.  There’s something magnetic in this.  You’ve been rushing headlong into this moment for most of the morning- hell, maybe most of the year you've been here- and now you absolutely need to see it through.  There isn’t any going back.  You’ve known it since stepping out of your door that morning, but only now can you really face it.  
  
You splay your fingers against the stone.  It’s smooth but not polished, plain and unmarked save for the curving symbol of his caste near the top.  Though everyone had agreed that they’d wanted to leave something by which he could be remembered, no one had really known exactly what.  Eventually they’d settled on this.  
  
A simple gravestone, set into the place you had first arrived in the world, it was a paltry tribute to his sacrifice.  You had said as much.  They’d all turned away and mumbled agreement and shuffled uneasily under your baleful glare, but in the end nothing else had been thought of and you were hardly in any place to do any contributing yourself.   Frankly, you were a fucking train-wreck.  
  
You’d felt hollow, scooped out and bleeding and raw.  If you were being completely honest here, you still felt that way minus the rawness, but you’d somehow become used to the gapping void, settled with having it just be a part of you now.  The space he used to fill was empty and now it seemed like it would always be.  
  
Your fingers keep moving, skipping over the cold stone till you reach the Capricorn symbol, and start to trace its curves with slow precision.  You remember tracing it over his shirt, him solid and real beneath it, a body just a little too thin from growing up with out getting quite enough to eat to equally grow out.  He’d always been cool to your touch... but never this cold.  Not even when he’d been holed up in the bowels of the meteor in the dark with his grisly prizes had he felt this frozen.  You recall vividly the cooling trails his long fingers would paint over your skin as he touched you, held you.  His breath ruffled your hair when he laughed, deep and soft and slightly unsettling, and you’d anchored yourself to him, to his very being.

What a fool you had been, but a happy fool.  Even in all your misery and fear, you’d still had him to retreat to and that had been enough.  You should have known fate would conspire to take him from you.  The one quadrant you had properly filled and now he was gone.  He wasn’t even here under this stone.  You still don’t know what you’re doing here, what any of this is supposed to accomplish.  
  
You let out a shuddering breath you didn’t even know you were holding and try to organize your thoughts.  Rose had told you to try talking, but you really can’t see the point of it.  You can’t see the point of anything anymore, really.  Still, you’ve come all the way out here, what harm can it do to linger a bit?  You bend and kneel down before the monument of death.  
  
The flowers you’ve been clinging to are wind battered and a little bruised now, but somehow that seems better than the fresh-from-the-store perfection they started as.  Nothing out here is alive anymore, not even these plants.  They’re just too stupid to realize they’ve been irrevocably severed from their life-line yet.  They reflect you perfectly, playing at being alive while the vitality slowly seeps out of them.  You suck in a breath.  
  
“I...” your voice sounds too loud in the silence, too cracked and rough, and you wince.  Rose had told you to talk, though.  She’d said that if you couldn’t open yourself to anyone else then you had to do it here, with him.  No one else has been able to offer up anything helpful.  You’re grasping at straws here, you know it, but there’s nothing left in you.  You clear your throat and try again, quieter but still feeling blasphemous and ridiculous.  
  
“I brought you these.  It’s some sort of earth tradition, I guess.”  
  
The stone doesn’t reply, of course, and your feeling more stupid by the second.  
  
“Why am I even doing this.  I can’t even fathom the depths of depraved self loathing I’ve sunk to to actually think this was even remotely a good idea.”  When you inhale again, you can’t help but let out a depreciative snort.   
  
“Let’s prattle at a piece of stone for an hour or two,” you laugh and it’s not a pleasant sound, strangled and broken.  “That’s a fantastic idea, Karkat, you blithering idiot.  Run your mouth at the inanimate object.  It’s not like anybody else is here to listen.  He’s not even... here.”  
  
Something cracked and jagged finally breaks open inside of you.  The next sound our of your mouth is a constrained sob.  
“He- you... you aren’t here.  You didn’t even have the decency to leave a corpse behind and all I have is this stupid rock.  You didn’t even say good bye properly, you dim-witted clown,” it all comes tumbling out in a rush and leaves you swallowing back bile.  He left you, to do what, you still aren’t sure.  All that you know is that it changed something in the final battle.  
  
“You were supposed to talk to me,” you hiss into the empty air, “you were my moirail, god damn it!  You should have told me what you were doing.  I’m- I was supposed to stop you from tripping over your pan rotted ideas.  I should have stopped you.  I should have been able to figure it out.   Why did...”  
  
Your hand curls, digging your claws against the impassive face of the granite as your voice fails you.  Too much is spilling out at once; not just misery but anger and guilt and you can’t get your fragile thoughts in order.  They’re washed away by the rushing flow of it all before they even get a chance to form coherency and all you can do is pick out the words screaming in your head-  
  
 _Failure_  
  
 _You couldn’t-_    
  
 _Idiot_  
  
 _-do you even bother, why can't-_  
  
 _Gamzee!_  
  
For a long moment all you can do is gasp at the frigid air and you welcome its sting in your lungs.  You squeeze your eyes shut let out one simpering mewl after another, whispering his name over and over again.  You’re pleading.  You don’t don’t know who or what with, but it hardly matters.  You just know that you need him like you never have before but that’s exactly what’s wrong.  He’s gone and nothing will change that.  
  
Some where in all of this you can’t help but blame yourself.  It’s a destructive thought, you know.  This was the alpha time-line and what ever happened had to have happened the way it did in order for you to win.  That niggling voice of self doubt won’t leave you alone, though.  It felt like there was a mistake made somewhere down the line and now it was too late to go back and fix it.  Everyone had gotten out, alive and whole, mended from what ever damage they had taken through the course of those events- everyone except for him.  His was the pound of flesh the horrerterrors had required, for what ever reason, and it was completely fucked up.You had wanted to scream and rail against whatever dark, dubious god had presided over that cluster fuck.  To beg and bargin, your life for his.  Who needed a failure of a mutant-blooded freak with out him, anyway?  
  
Your breathing has mostly evened out now, save for the occasional hitch or sniffle.  You rest your forehead against the frigid mockery and it’s coolness seeps into your fevered brain.  It takes you another few slow breaths, but you think you can find your words again.  You lick your lips, chapped and flayed from the wind and your tears and snot, and you try to grasp for words without stumbling.  
  
“It wasn’t supposed to be you,” your voice only comes as a whisper.  “I was the blood player.  I was the sacrifice, or I should have been. Fuck every thing in this universe twice because it was supposed to be _my_ useless body on the fire.”  
  
You shift to sit beside the stone and press against it.  The wind has picked back up and it’s dancing dead leaves through the air down in the shallow gullies where they’ve tended to gather and pool.  You sit with your back to it and pull your jacket tighter around you.  
  
“What am I supposed to do now?  I didn’t plan for this Gamzee, I really didn’t.  Always thought that if something was strong enough to take you out then it would just be done with the rest of us and that would be that.”  
  
You turn into the marker a little farther and drop your cheek to rest on it.  He’s not here.  He never will be and you know that, but if you close your eyes and let your mind drift then your memory turns to his face and you can almost picture him leaning over you with his quizzical smile slapped crookedly across his painted features.  

  
“I wish that... no, wishing is stupid.  We got out alive and we got our stupid little prize world so I can’t ask for anything else.  But I miss you.  I miss you so much and it _hurts_.”  
  
You realize you’re still holding the silly bouquet and you start to idly pick at wilted leaves.  The words are already drying up, the dam broken and drained, but there’s still a little more left.  
  
“I think I know why you did it, though.  I think, in the end, you were still just trying to be my moirail.  You were still trying to protect me in all of you're absolutely twisted up logic.”  
  
The wind shifts and pushes at you, urging.  You think it’s time to leave, for now.  There’s still more weighing on your heart and will be for a long time you think, but you’re undone and spent.  It feels like you’ve sicked up some of the thing that’s been poisoning your heart, and you feel  exhausted and strung out, but you think that the trek back here next time might not be such a chore.

You finally pull your self to your feet, leaving the flowers at the foot of the stone but for some reason, you can’t help but linger over it.   
  
“I was so pale for you.”  You thought that you had said all you could but the words come spilling out of your mouth.  They feel right, so you let this last little bit slip out.  
  
“Loved you, so much."  
  
Your fingers have gone back to leaving touches on the the rocky surface.  They’re almost caressing it now, and an impulse catches you so quickly that you’re moving before you’ve even registered it.  Your lips brush the stonework as you drop a soft kiss on to it’s top.  It’s cold and unyielding and gives you nothing back, no comfort or concern, but it still feels correct.  
  
Now there really isn’t anything left in you.  You still feel carved out, but at this moment it’s as if something rotten has been taken from your core.  This doesn’t fix anything, not by a long shot, but you think that it might have helped a little.  You turn away and start your long hike back to your car.  It will be nearing afternoon by the time you make it back into town, and for the first time in you-can’t-remember-when you think you might actually feel hungry.  
  
At the bottom of the hill you cast a glance back behind you, but the fog has moved in to swallow the top back up again, taking secrets you whispered to and empty grave with it.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Oh god I am really sor... look, here's a carton of ice cream and some spoons. Let's just go sit on the couch and weep bitterly while we eat it.


End file.
